Positivism in the Face of the End Times
by Becky Blue Eyes
Summary: Who needs a Russian billionaire to see out the apocalypse? OC-based, OC-central, OC-driven. Rated M for language and dark subject matter.


**Positivism in the Face of the End Times**

**The Premise: Who needs a Russian billionaire to see out the apocalypse?**

**The Cast: 8 University of California, Riverside first years, 2 California high school students**

**-Daniel Matthews (18) Creative writing major**

**-Alec Youngblood (17) Geology major**

**-Karen Youngblood (14) Alta Loma High school student**

**-Ian Bhandari (19) Computer science major**

**-June Sagawa (18) Japanese language major, considering teaching credentials**

**-Emile Johnson (19) Political science major**

**-Sonny Johnson (13) Arlington High school student**

**-Robert "Bobby" Gomez (18) Music major**

**-Eudora Gardner (19) Economics major**

**-Roxanne Reid (17) Psychology major, considering nursing school**

* * *

Daniel wasn't the kind of guy to buy into that whole 2012 end-of-the-world crap on the internet.

His mom flat out begged him to not go out to Laughlin for the weekend, but she was paranoid to the nth degree, always raving from her basement that the government was hiding aliens and diseases and nuclear war heads from the sheeple of the United States. He had waved her off, joking that in Emile's RV they could hole up by the Colorado River and ride out the end times, set up a new society. Besides, like hell he wasn't going on the trip; Alec's sister Karen and Emile's cousin Sonny were too young for the Vegas scene, and Laughlin was closer to Riverside anyway.

So he set out with the rest of the group he had befriended in college, celebrating their first real winter vacation. They all pitched in for extra gas and energy drinks and snack cakes, and not a single note of distress over tuition or class unit caps were noted. Just 8 dumb college friends and 2 minors for a weekend of fun on the river walk, enjoying that white hot Nevada sun before the cold season made UCR into a rainy mess.

It was supposed to be a getaway, and so Daniel felt it ironic that they had been spared from California flipping its shit like an upended coffee table.

The whole of their lives were gone in an hour. All the radios and TVs and internet sites were on fire with the news that the Golden State had literally fallen into the ocean. Daniel was proud to say that he didn't cry like Ian (his entire family lived in Pasadena) or June (she was second generation Japanese, no other ties to America except her tiny little house in Fontana) or Emile (he loved his grandparents, enough to convince them to move down with Sonny to Riverside). And he didn't go out and get drunk like Roxanne and Bobby (nobody was going to keep them from drinking, not when they just became orphans), or hole up in his room like Sonny or Eudora (probably calling her estranged uncle in New York, someone needed to tell him that he could never make up with the rest of his now-deceased family).

No, he sat by the Colorado and watched tremors rack the stressed out casinos. When the sun started to set Alec came over with Karen, and they watched shadows grow over the faces of the sand and hills and people.

"So I guess we're not going back to UCR."

"Nope."

They had to drag Bobby and Roxanne back to their rooms after the bars closed (too many workers running back to Needles to make sure it was still there) and repacked their things just in case, before lying down in their beds to try and sleep. Daniel didn't; instead he listened to the other guys breathe and choke back sobs and startle out of nightmares. He wondered what it must've looked like, to see an entire landmass subside itself like some pissed off Minecraft hacker on a homicide kick. He bet it looked ridiculous.

But the next day at ass o'clock in the morning he got to find out for himself.

Earthquakes ripped open the Nevada-California-Arizona lithosphere because in its need for fault lines it decided to make its own. Karen had woken up in the girl's room (her brother always said she was a light sleeper, not even exhaustion from a day's disaster could keep her down) and Alec had to go calm her down and then his earth science class started setting off alarm bells. That saved everyone's life; by the time the other hotel people started absconding it was too late. Emile's RV was a huge army-grade monolith of off-road power, so they absconded from that mess and made their way into the desert. The water of the river sloshed with each quake and had he not lived in California for his entire life, Daniel would've screamed. But once he saw the earth start swallowing the California side he let out a series of manly yells.

June clung to his arm as Emile rode the earth past its destruction, following the birds to somewhere in Arizona. Daniel could give a fuck where they went, just away from there and whatever was making the earth not act like..well, the earth!

By the time Emile stopped they were somewhere in the desert by the upset river, everything knocked over with dust rising up to dirty the windows. Ian stuttered that they needed to find civilization (what the hell kind of a word is that anyway? Civilization? What is civilized about ten kids under 20 being chased by the earth ripping open a new coast?) and Eudora quickly set the direction.

"Well, behind us is a whole lotta nope, to the right is more nope, and the left is also chock full of nope. Just follow the water to the next river city and hopefully it won't be underground."

Eudora may have been just your average economics major, but she had a way of summarizing the situation. And off they went, Sonny using his vast mastery of smartphones to keep them all updated. All the servers for anything on the west coast were down, probably dead for good. Facebook was flooding with desperate friends trying to figure out who was alive, and Google was slower than the water taps in the RV. Speaking of which..."Emile, how much water and gas do we have?"

"Enough to get us back to UCR, so probably Phoenix or something like that."

"Nah bro, we gotta stay by the river; there's nothing by Phoenix but sand and dehydration and nope."

"Bobby's right; let's just stick by the river. Not like there's some robocop highway patrol to tell us not to."

And June was right; there was no-one to keep them from driving up towards what Google Maps said was Lake Mohave. Daniel noticed that there was nobody anywhere; it was like they were the last survivors of some nuclear holocaust. And if his mom (oh god his mom, what was the last thing he said to her?) was right, a bunch of nuclear war heads probably blew up in the California wreck. Some mess that was, his mom being right about the end of the world.

Lake Mohave was a wasteland too. The resorts there had been sucked into the ground with rubble piles acting as grave markers. This was the last straw for Sonny, who ran off to cry in peace. Daniel let him go as everyone else shifted uneasily; the kid was thirteen, nobody at age thirteen wanted others to seem them cry, to see them in their moment of weakness. Mom hated that, she would hole herself up in the basement whenever the fear grew too much...

The sun was making the white toe of his sneaker glow. A little treasure marker for him, some where to bury his pain. Emile ran off after Sonny, Karen was sleeping in the RV with Roxanne, Bobby threw up behind a bush, and the others made a loose circle in the shade of a broken building. Like a drum circle that this Joel guy would hold by the HUB, all hippie and shit and damn, UCR really was gone. "You guys all getting high?"

"As if; Stoner Steve lived in Upland, remember?"

"Yeah. Poor bastard probably died at a [10]."

"Shit man, that sounds great! Better than this slowly starve to death out in the boonies crap we're in."

"Can we even drink the lake water? Like, it's freshwater, right?"

"Yeah but I bet some pipeline burst under it. That's how life works, anyway."

Daniel shifted, grinding dust under the sole of his shoe. "We should go get supplies or something. Bet we're not the only RV up here with spare gas tanks."

And so they did. Daniel took Alec, June and Ian out to the wreckage; they were the work out buddies, they could deal with lifting and sprinting and carefully shifting through the crumbling resort. Alec found the kitchen, full of tins and cans and dried food that could be saved for later and perishables, like desserts and fruit, that they hauled back for lunch. Daniel thought they looked like little worker ants, making lines in the dust as they scavenged. How lovely. "Get the water too. Shit, do we need like soap or plates or some shit like that?"

"We need all the things. We just don't have all the room."

It was a godsend that Roxanne had volunteered for the Red Cross. Once she beat down her hangover with orange juice and Monster, she made lists and piles for them to fill. Food, water, gas, maps and first aid kits (that's something Mom always harped on about, one infection and you were fucked harder than a Bangkok stripper) were essential to survival. Soap and hygienic products not so much but she'd be damned if they didn't go back into the bathrooms and dig some out, because hot and sweaty young adults in one RV made for a hell hole. All else they could do without.

Ian cut up his knee falling through a floor and Roxanne patched him up with a strip of gauze. As the day ended and everyone relaxed Daniel stared out into the broken resort and wondered if it hurt to die like that, crushed and mangled and burnt. Crushed (California homes were tough but not that tough, not even the basement), mangled (like Ian's knee, all red and oozing and smelling of iron), burnt (the gas lines would've gone up in flames, killing everyone stuck under a table or pinned under a TV or in that basement, riding out the fear). Crushed, mangled, burnt, crushed, mangled burnt.

Daniel couldn't remember what he last said to his mother, or the last time he told her he loved her.

Then tears were pouring out of his eyes like the Colorado, and he couldn't breathe out of his choking throat. Alec, Alec was holding him and they were in his bed, Alec murmuring that it was going to be ok as he sobbed into his shoulder, and maybe not now or tomorrow or the next day he would feel ok, but he was going to be ok. June hugged him around the middle, pressing warmth into his back, and the others kept the silence as Daniel's heart ruptured like the surface of California.

They stayed by that lake until more earthquakes blew up the Davis Dam and flooded the area. It was a weird kind of beauty, watching the river reclaim its reservoir from a distance, with the water looking so eerily calm. After that it was a matter of following the river up from away from Laughlin, pissing behind bushes to keep the bathroom pipes clear and stealing from the deceased. Too many homes were destroyed, too many people crushed and mangled and burnt, but Daniel got over it. He had to.

Sonny was their tie to the outside world, master of all the smart phones as their well of 3G dried up. Eudora had the presence of mind to wonder how the fuck were they going to survive in the desert if they didn't know how to work the land, and after that Sonny was attached to Wikipedia by the hip, shuttling saved copies of farming and irrigation and water purification and desert predators and all this vital information from iPhones and Androids to his laptop. He seemed happier than all of them; Daniel tagged that to being of service.

It was after finally clearing Lake Mohave that Sonny startled. "Guys, Yellowstone erupted!"

"What?!"

"It blew up just now!"

"Oh fuck that's...that's fucked up."

"Isn't that the biggest volcano in the world?"

"Alec, you're an earth science or geology or whatever the earth-fuck major, what is this gonna do?"

Alec opened his mouth then hesitated, before motioning for Karen to get in him arms. "We...oh damn guys, we're fucked."

"Why?!"

"Because now there's a giant cloud of ash and dust coming from the north, and if it's going as quickly as the rest of the world is falling apart, we're gonna hit it in a few days."

Emile stopped the RV and demanded where he should go. Alec, now smiling faintly, shrugged. "We need the river for water and people to get things from, so we can't make a break for Phoenix. But if we go up to Las Vegas, that cloud is going to kill the RV and us too. But if we turn around...Sonny, are there still earthquakes happening around the world?"

"...uh yeah, there's a whole site about them. Everything around the Pacific is going under."

"There's a reason why the west coast gets tsunamis. If we go too far back either we'll fall into the earth or get swept out to sea."

Nobody said much after that. Emile ended up driving back to an empty camping site and stating that until the world decided to stop fucking them over, they were just gonna stay here. Then they settled down for the night and Daniel found himself counting the shades of red that Roxanne's hair would turn once hit by moonlight.

After breakfast and bathing in the river (oh fuck it was cold, but it was better than the feeble bathroom plumbing) they laid out by the river, watching a weird sort of half lake half river spring up in the banks of Lake Mohave. Karen spotted a fish, and Emile snapped his fingers; his grandpa kept his fishing gear in the RV, and a little fresh food couldn't hurt anyone.

Daniel learned to fish that day, his nose sunburnt and his shoulders aching as these fucking fish refused to get on his line. But with June laughing in the background he caught this nice little fish for Bobby to fry over an open fire. Emile caught a bunch more with Ian and Eudora pitching in, and Roxanne made a pitcher of lemonade Kool-Aid to keep them hydrated. Sonny figured out how to purify the river water, Alec and Karen jury rigged the radio to blast their iPod's wonderfully shitty 80s synth pop, and Daniel watched a little community of ten souls prosper by the river. It was like camping and the beginnings of civilization all over again, except that this time he didn't have a history book to tell him how it will end.

The next day Daniel found himself reading Sonny's copy of Harry Potter. The kid brought the entire set for chilling in his hotel room, and Daniel tugged on his shoe lace. "If we live to have kids, these will be the only books they're going to have."

Karen then freaked out and scoured her suitcase for her books, and burst into tears. She had forgotten the third book of The Uglies, and now no one other than her will ever know what it was. After that came the saddest piece of knowledge known to a California native: "Guys, if we have kids, none of them will get to go to Disneyland."

"But...but it's..."

"My childhood!"

"No one will do anything with Disney anymore..."

"Shit, what about the Disney movies?"

Alec then dragged a duffel bag out from under a pile of food, explaining that he brought some just in case Karen got bored in Laughlin. And so the entire library of Disney movies, its entire legacy, was reduced to 20 DVDs, one missing its case. "I think this one's a bootleg version of Wreck-It Ralph my friend Tyler made. He loved that movie..."

That night they watched Alice in Wonderland before going to bed. Daniel liked the name Alice; if he lived long enough to have a daughter he'll name her Alice. And in the darkness of sleeping time, he asked out loud, "What will you name your kids after the world ends?"

"...each daughter shall be a Disney princess and each son a DC hero. Gotta keep the spirit alive."

"I'll name my kids after Greek gods, it's not like there's a proper society to criticize me."

"All the old fashioned names that my relatives in Japan had, like Kyoko and Sachiko and Mayumi..."

"After flowers and fruit and sunshine; they'll be of short supply in a few years."

"Maxis for a girl, Sega for a boy. Maybe my kids will end up better than those poor bastards."

"California is a pretty name. Someone should have it now."

The whispers tapered off into morning, and Daniel wondered what his mother would think of children named for video games and children's movies. He got up and stared towards what he felt was north (hard to tell, the air was too crisp and it burned his nose and made his eyes water) and watched for dark clouds or more earthquakes. Neither one came as they fished and gathered water and hissed at scavenging animals that dared venture to close. Nothing happened, it was static and Daniel's memory of the Before Time became fuzzy with survival's needs.

A few days later Alec spotted those poison clouds to the far north and spent the whole day measuring the wind, deciding whether they should stay or flee. Daniel lingered by the water, humming a mish mash of songs he once heard. That was right, with the radio and satellite stations being devoted to emergency communication, the whole of the music industry had given out beneath the feet of California's surface. No more KIIS FM or Top 20 on 20 or Pandora, it was dust in his ears as it all blended away into the background noise of fear.

"We all have iPods, right? That makes...what, 10,000 songs?"

"Give or take, yeah."

"Shit, my kids better like techno and dubstep. I wonder if they're all dead now..."

"I have a bunch of Mozart and Beethoven I use...used to study to, so yay?"

"Am I the only person here who listens to swing and electro swing? You can dance to that."

"I saved a bunch of video game soundtracks to my laptop for a friend once. I guess we can listen to that too."

Alec turned towards the group. "The cloud's going west from here, so we're safe for now."

They sighed with relief and stuck by the water, swimming and fishing and watching the dark clouds swallow Las Vegas whole. Daniel wondered if a plane could fly through that, but he figured if people could live through ash then Pompeii wouldn't have happened. Eudora braided the longest heads of hair into delicate Dutch crowns, rambling about her grandmother and winters spent in the snow. Bobby's tiny little abuelita gave the best hugs in his entire family, while June grew up with her parents' work ethic and eternal optimism. Ian's father defied tradition to marry his lower caste mother, and Emile and Sonny shared their grandfather's love of music. Roxanne's stepdad filled the empty void her deadbeat father left, and Alec's uncle taught him and his sister how to whistle.

Daniel's mom shared her suspicions and fears and paranoia every day from the basement, but she loved him as much as she was able to. So much love, so much tradition, all of it stranded in the desert as their elders rotted at the bottom of the ocean. Crushed, mangled and burnt, their relatives missed out on the end times.

But they weren't dead. No, they were living the high life by the new banks of Lake Mohave (or Lake Yes in the Land of Nope, as Bobby christened it) with little issues like toothpaste and birth control prompting Daniel to steal a boat from the campsite. Across the lake was another resort, with gas and shampoo and band aids they needed. Bobby and Eudora came, the water lapping at their shoes as they unsteadily made their way across the river-lake. There was more dead people, their bodies dried out by the sun before they could bloat with decay, and Daniel pillaged like a Viking. No, more like a character from the Walking Dead, except bullets weren't in such high demand. "Why are we the only bastards smart enough to not die in these earthquakes?"

"It's cuz we're California kids, all these other guys got scared and fucked up."

Eudora took them back across five times because there was a wealth of gas in the collapsed parking lot (Mom said that gasoline could last a year, after a year they were done for because the RV was their home now, right?) and the girls all washed their hair in the lake. Daniel watched them from on top of the RV, letting the setting sun heat the cold in his gut. Bobby played cards with Alec "We're going to have to repopulate the earth or some shit, right?"

"That's gross Bobby."

"But it's true! We gotta like, have babies to keep the human race alive."

"Stay away from my sister"

"Eww bro, she's like what, fourteen? We gotta wait until we're twenty five, that's when it'll be good enough here..."

The days bled together, sometimes punctuated by little earthquakes that made Daniel curl up on the ground and listen to the angry earth. Trips across the water for lotion and fishing hooks and tampons, Sonny downloading everything from the geography of Arizona to the history of rollerblading from Wikipedia as more and more of it became inaccessible. Eudora's uncle called, frantic about apologies and earthquakes ripping holes in Manhattan before he got disconnected as skyscrapers toppled. Eudora went swimming for a long time and came back with calm eyes, shrugging it off. It wasn't the end of the world.

It wasn't, they were ok as long as they didn't screw around and get injured, and if they really needed supplies they could move. But Daniel liked their little spot, with the sparse trees swaying to each tremor and the fishes swirling in the cold Colorado and the sun white hot in the cold air. Lake Yes was a good place, and he could cry if he needed to in the shadow of a boulder by the RV.

It rained, forcing them to stay in the RV as the river swelled and the lakeshore bubbled with foam. Daniel tapped against the window to dislodge little water droplets stuck to the glass, and June leaned against his shoulder. "Mother would say when I was little that mighty dragons caused the rain."

"Mama said that it was angles crying for our sins."

"Huh, never pegged you for a Christian, Bobby."

"Catholic. All us mud people are Catholics. Not that it matters man, didn't the Sistine Chapel collapse or something like that?"

"Yep, it rolled like a soda can all over those Italian guys. I bet the temples back in India did the same thing too. At least I get another life to try again."

"Sure thing, Mr. Reincarnation. What about you Alec, aren't you a Christian?"

"Nah, if there was a God he wouldn't be so sloppy in ending the world." Laughter against the rain, warm in the cold. "I don't believe in religion anymore."

"Well, I believe in the rain and the desert and the internet."

"That's the makings of the greatest religion of all time."

"Yes, our new society shall have a new religion to meet the changing times. I, Roxanne, shall be the High Priestess because dibs, and you all shall be my followers."

"What you gonna call it?"

"...it shall be known as Positivism, its followers battling against the forces of Nope that has sunken the Biblical Garden of Cali into the Sea. Saint Karen, blessed by powers of foresight and bad sleeping habits, foresaw the further destruction of the Damned Cities of Laughlin and Bullhead City, so the followers traveled along the Holy River of Colorado to Lake Yes, where they were Blessed with fish and toothpaste. And we rejoiced and became super powered kick-ass saints that will be worshiped for all eternity blah blah blah..."

Daniel slung his arm around June's shoulders as he leaned farther into the window, listening to thunder rage in the ash cloud far away. The rain continued into the night as the Cult grew into its own, and Sonny made it a Wikipedia page before they finally drifted off to sleep.

The river went back to normal the following days, their supply of sun block dwindling to the point where their skin toughened against the sun after burning lobster red. Daniel played slide with Eudora, tried to drown Ian, and laid out in the sun as birds nestled in the trees. Then the earth trembled as the birds flew away and he swore he could see the horizon melting to the far south-east. He grabbed Alec's shoulder, and Alec nodded. "Ah, that would be the mega tsunami I've been waiting for."

"Ah, I see."

Everyone nodded sagely and piled their supplies calmly into their RV, discussing the merits of driving away from the river. After Emile refilled the tank they drove up and away from the basin around Lake Yes, the river catching most of the water and swelling like the day Laughlin fell into the earth. Into the wilderness they drove, completely at ease as the water grew larger in the windows. Daniel held onto Alec's hand. "Remember when we all met in UCR?"

"Yeah, at that stupid orientation."

"Oh yeah, with Scotty the Pedobear?"

"That stupid dance where Ian spilled his punch on Roxanne..."

"And we all spent registering for classes at the back of the fucking line, shooting rubber bands onto the roof."

"Serves them right for making us wait."

"It was all those honors kids, getting the first pick."

"Like that did them any good; they're all dead!"

Daniel laughed long and hard, tears spilling down his cheeks as water surged up against the wheels. What the hell did honors ever do for those poor bastards, they weren't out here, they were dead and crushed and mangled and burnt. And sure he was going to drown but it was a-fucking-ok, because for all his mom's paranoia he didn't die in California, he lived and swam and fished and scavenged and cried in his best friend's shirt, surrounded by his new family of misfit orphans. Fuck the world, he survived the end of it and all this was just extra.

And then the waters pulled back to the river and they rode off into the dust, the sun setting as the tsunami redoubled on the shattered remains of California that sucked up most of the sea. The world ended with that state, and it would stay with that state and Lake Yes receded back to normal and they came back to their campsite.

And then they didn't die. They survived again and oh fuck it was going to be ok, just like his friends said it would be.

And then they fished the next day and rebuilt their little homestead. A few weeks later Karen spotted an RV just like theirs, full of migrant workers who escaped California just like them.

More and more people came to Lake Yes from the edges of the Land of Nope, bringing food and supplies and knowledge and voices laughing in the night. A shuttle full of Las Vegas survivors brought more technology for Sonny to hook up into a bootleg, crackpot network. Only a few servers in Scandinavia and Africa were online but hell if it was enough for Sonny to declare it a miracle it was enough for Daniel, who held June close as they looked over the growing field of RVs and cars and tents.

Weeks turned to months turned to years, filled with supply shortages and illnesses and Bobby breaking his leg. But they rode it out, everyone did as all the survivors of the End Times came to Lake Yes, a beacon in the Land of Nope. Even when the ash cloud circled back from over the ocean and clogged up the sun, it wasn't the end. Even when they struggled to decide if they should have children and if so how should the families grow, they survived, and by the shoes of Lake Yes a new civilization thrived.

The eight dumb college kids with two minors grew up and old, pairing off with others or with each other, it didn't even matter. Sanctioned by Positivism, Daniel was married to June and Alec, and they were married to Vivian and Fred and Sam and whomever was there to be a friend or a lover; everyone was married to everyone, for they were all survivors and needed every bit of love they could get. They were teachers and farmers and leaders, and their little brats named Sunshine and Reiko and Zeus and Robin and Maxis and California and Alice that grew up into college students who hated orientation and shot rubber bands onto rooftops.

And when helicopters touched down outside of Lake Yes University, Daniel stared those fuckers down. Where the hell were they when California fell into the ocean, when the internet collapsed and he had to steal the shoes off of a month old corpse when January came burning cold that year? Where was the government when all the mothers died? His mom was right, the US government could kiss his ass. They came trying to suck their community into their new government and he laughed. These bastards came from across the Land of Nope with their silk suits and archived paintings and fat faced filled with Belgian chocolates. Daniel had his best friend's RV filled with extra gas and energy drinks and snack cakes.

As if he needed a Russian billionaire to help him run his civilization, much less see out the apocalypse!

So at the end of his life, Daniel sat on the roof of Emile's sacred RV, watching the sun rise over the sprawling city by the banks of the Colorado, and exhaled. They built the largest civilization west of Scandinavia and Africa by themselves, completely out of the fragmented memories of the orphaned youth, and he was so fucking proud because Alec was right, it was going to be ok.

* * *

**And that's it! I hope you liked it :D**


End file.
